Improve Your Team’s Productivity with Free Software from Bitrix24

Angela Rose CommentsOctober 19, 2018

No matter what industry your business is in –from design and marketing to IT and travel– efficiency is essential to productivity. Bitrix24, a collaboration platform that provides a complete suite of free tools, was designed to increase business productivity through social collaboration, communication and management functions.

Collaboration Tools for Every Business Worldwide

Founded in 2008 by Sergey Rizhikov (CEO), Dmitry Valyanov (President), Alexey Sidorenko (VP), Vadim Dumbravanu (VP Technology) and Yury Tushinsky (CTO), and headquartered in Alexandria, VA, the Bitrix company launched Bitrix24 in 2008. Since then, more than 3.5 million organizations have chosen to use the platform.

“Bitrix24 is suitable for teams of all sizes, from solopreneurs to large organizations,” Yuliya Skorobogatova, Bitrix Content Marketing Strategist, told RewardExpert. “As we offer more than 35 business tools, every team will find something useful. Bitrix24 is available in 10 languages and six more are coming.”

The Best Tools for Solopreneurs

For the smallest organizations, Skorobogatova recommends Bitrix24’s tasks and document management tools as well as the company’s mobile app.

“Freelancing requires keeping a lot of things under control,” she explained. “Our task tools allow freelancers to run several projects simultaneously. You can set a deadline or control the time you spend on each task. When a task involves several steps, you can add a checklist and follow the progress point-by-point.”

Image via bitrix24.com

The document management tools allow users to “save all your working files in Bitrix24 so they are easily accessible from everywhere,” Skorobogatova continued. “You can also allow editing documents to other users and see who made changes and when. All previous versions are saved, and you can recover them at any time.”

Skorobogatova noted that the Bitrix24 mobile app gives users access to the software’s features wherever they are. “Mobile CRM, tasks, calendar and tools for real-time communications make Bitrix24 an all-in-one solution for solo entrepreneurs.”

Top Tools for Teams

If your organization is organized into teams, Skorobogatova said that some of the most useful features you’ll find in Bitrix24 are the Gantt Chart, real time communication tools and calendars.

“Any team, big or small, will appreciate the Gantt Chart,” she explained. “Collaboration is a tricky process and when it comes to shared responsibilities, or when your work is very dependent on the work of your colleagues, the Gantt Chart becomes indispensable. At a single glance you can see all the tasks and subtasks in a project with statuses, deadlines, responsible people and task dependencies. You can see the bottlenecks in the project and take measures to make things work.”

Bitrix24’s real-time communication tools “allow you to choose the communication channel you like,” Skorobogatova said. “It can be an Activity Stream, which is kind of an internal social network, or a private or group chat if you prefer communication in messengers. If you work globally and you need to call your colleagues or organize video conferences, Bitrix24 can do that too.”

Skorobogatova noted that the platform’s calendar tools allow teams to easily share personal and workgroup calendars inside the system. “They’re available on all mobile devices,” she added. “This tool enables managers to monitor the workload of employees and coordinate the projects from everywhere.”

Image via bitrix24.com

Options for Large Organizations

Skorobogatova said the company usually recommends their on-premise edition of the software for large corporations.

“It comes with open source code and you can customize Bitrix24 according to your specific needs and make integrations critical to your business,” she explained. “Moreover, Bitrix24 on-premise editions give you full control over your data. Our web clustering module makes it easily scalable to a company of any size.”

Bitrix24’s CRM tools are favorites of the large organizations that use the company’s platform. “The larger the scale of your business, the more you will have to care about your customers,” Skorobogatova said. “Here comes our CRM with a multichannel customer contact center, detailed reports and marketing automation. Bitrix24 keeps track of all your interactions with customers, creates invoices, sets sales targets and much more. As a result, you are fully aware of your clients’ needs and can close more sales and grow.”

Finally, Skorobogatova noted that large organizations may also benefit from the Bitrix24 Human Resources Information System (HRIS), which includes a searchable employee directory, absence chart, HR forms and records management.

“Bitrix24 makes it very easy for new employees to onboard while saving lost of time for HR managers by automating most of these business processes,” she concluded.